Seducing the subconscious the psychology of emotional influence in advertising robert heath (2012)

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Seducing the Subconscious


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Seducing the Subconscious
The Psychology of Emotional Influence
in Advertising

Dr Robert Heath

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication


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This edition first published 2012
C 2012 Robert Heath
Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heath, Robert, 1947–
Seducing the subconscious : the psychology of emotional influence in advertising /
Robert Heath.
p. cm.
Summary: “Seducing the Subconscious reveals how this brave new advertising world works,
using illustrative examples of advertising campaigns that have been hugely successful without
anyone quite being able to recall what they were trying to communicate” – Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-97488-9 (hardback)

1. Advertising–Psychological aspects. I. Title.
HF5822.H37 2012
659.101 9–dc23
2011043014
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in
print may not be available in electronic books.
Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by Aptara Inc., New Delhi, India
1

2012


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Contents

Foreword

ix

Introduction

1

Part 1 Taking Advertising Apart
1

The Persuasion Model

15

2

Alternative Ideas

24

3

Why We Don’t Pay Attention to Advertising

39

Part 1 Summary

48

Part 2 The Psychology of Communication
4

Learning and Attention

53

5

The Role of Memory

63

6

How We Process Communication

74

7

Problems with Getting Attention

85

Part 2 Summary

95

Part 3 Emotion and Consciousness
8

Emotional Processing

101

9

Our Adaptive Subconscious

111

Emotion and Attention

123

Part 3 Summary

133

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Contents

Part 4 Decisions and Relationships
11

Decision-Making

137

12

The Power of Metacommunication

149

13

The Subconscious Seduction Model

160

Part 4 Summary

174

Part 5 Taking A Fresh Look at Advertising
14

Under the Radar

179

15

The Hidden Power of New Media

189

16

Legal, Decent, Honest, and Truthful?

198

17

How to Spot Subconscious Seduction

207

Conclusion

219

References

229

Index

239


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Foreword

“Advertising may be described as the science of
arresting the human intelligence long enough to get
money from it.”
Stephen Butler Leacock
Crown’s Book of Political Quotations (1982)
When people are asked about advertising, they often find it quite difficult to
remember any. If pressed, they usually come up with famous old campaigns
like “I’d like to buy the world a Coke. . . ,” or American Express “Don’t leave
home without it,” or The Marlboro Cowboy, or the Jolly Green Giant. In
the UK they might mention the Cadbury’s Smash Martians, the Guinness
Surfer, Heineken “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,” or the Gold
Blend couple.
There then usually follows a discussion about how much advertising
influences us. Most of us like to think that it doesn’t influence us unless we
are stupid enough to let it. We believe this because we assume advertising
works by persuasion, and persuasion is associated with others (typically
our parents) trying to argue us into doing something we don’t want to do.
Persuasion is a rational verbal process, so if we don’t hear or remember what
an advertisement says, how can we be persuaded by it?
Many experts agree that advertising isn’t nearly as persuasive as it claims it
is. In the opening paragraph of his book Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion,
Michael Shudson writes:
Advertising is much less powerful than advertisers and critics of advertising
claim, and advertising agencies are stabbing in the dark much more than they

are practicing precision microsurgery on the public consciousness. (Shudson
1984: xiii)


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Foreword

I agree with Shudson. Having worked in nine different advertising agencies over a period of 23 years, I can testify to just how much chance, serendipity, and stabbing in the dark is involved in the creation of great advertising
campaigns. Admen may like to masquerade as experts in persuasion, but
in many ways they are little more than gifted amateurs. I’d say the average
young person on a date is many times more adroit in the art of persuasion
than the average creative team.
But if advertising isn’t very good at persuading us, how come those
companies that use advertising are amongst the most successful in the
world? I think the explanation is that advertising has ways of influencing
us we are not aware of, and that don’t involve persuasion. In this matter
Shudson and I are also in agreement, for while he asserts that ads are not
very persuasive, he also acknowledges that:

This does not mean ads are ineffective. In fact . . . television ads may be more
powerful precisely because people pay them so little heed that they do not
call critical defences into play. (Shudson 1984: 4)

Shudson’s source for this idea was the psychologist, Herb Krugman.
Krugman’s theories caused something of a stir in the 1970s, mainly because
they suggested that TV advertising received low levels of attention. This was
seen by the ad industry as being too difficult a pill to swallow, and Krugman’s
ideas were pretty much ignored until the start of the twenty-first century,
when I wrote a monograph called The Hidden Power of Advertising (Heath
2001).
The Hidden Power of Advertising was based on Krugman’s idea that TV
advertising could influence us even when processed inattentively. Since its
publication in 2001 there has been a steady growth in the number of people
who accept that advertising subjected to “low attention processing” can be
effective. That said, many of those who work in the ad industry still cling to
the notion that advertising works only through persuasion, and works best
at high attention.
Although my monograph referred extensively to psychology, it was not
seen by academia as being rigorous enough. In order to overcome this hurdle
I elected to become an academic myself. I studied for and was awarded a
PhD, and I read and wrote articles in academic journals. But the more I
researched the subject, the more it struck me that this “other” way in which
advertising works, this alternative to persuasion, was quite possibly much
more influential than persuasion. Many people have expressed worries about


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xi

how advertising might be influencing us without our knowledge, might
somehow be “manipulating” our behavior subconsciously; and now I was
finding that their worries were not entirely without foundation.
This alternative way in which advertising works is what I call Subconscious Seduction. I should stress this has nothing to do with the subliminal
effects mentioned in Vance Packard’s famous book The Hidden Persuaders.
Packard’s claims about messages exposed below the threshold of perception
were based on a hoax, and there is no evidence at all that advertising can
influence us in this way. No, perhaps even more worrying is that advertising’s ability to seduce our subconscious uses elements that are in our full
view and easy for us to discern. The problem is that although we are able to
perceive and attend to these elements, we mostly choose not to.
So advertising’s ability to work in this way isn’t like subliminal exposure,
something we can legislate against or put a stop to. It happens partly because
of the way our minds work, and partly because of the way we make decisions.
This means that explaining the Subconscious Seduction model isn’t a simple
story: it involves collecting together and considering complex ideas about
how we perceive and think and feel and remember and forget. These ideas
have been brought into the public domain only in the last two decades,
by academics such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Schacter,

Joseph LeDoux, and Steven Rose. Although these ideas are complex, I have
done my best to describe them in language that anyone can understand. I
have sought to avoid the situation summed up so eloquently by my great
friend the late Andrew Ehrenberg, who once told me: “There is nothing in
the world so complex that it cannot, when considered by a group of clever
people, be made more complex.”
There are many people who I must thank for helping me write this
book. Most especially I would like to thank Paul Feldwick and Jon Howard,
whose insights first inspired my research. Also, in no particular order, Tim
Ambler, David Brandt, Jeremy Bullmore, Wendy Gordon, Arthur Kover,
Agnes Nairn, Douglas West, and the dozens of others who have indirectly
contributed to this book. Above all I should like to express my gratitude
and love to my wife, friend, and subeditor Frances Liardet, without whose
support my career as a writer might never have come to pass.


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Introduction

“I think that I shall never see

An ad so lovely as a tree.
But if a tree you have to sell,
It takes an ad to do that well.”
Jef I. Richards
Retort to Ogden Nash (1995)11
Advertising is a huge business, and a huge success story. You only have to
look at the turnover of those companies who use advertising intensively
(Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Unilever, Kraft, Nestl´e, Johnson & Johnson,
Reckitt Benckiser, etc.) to know that investing in advertising pays off
in spades.
But trying to get under the surface and explain why advertising is so
effective is surprisingly difficult. One reason is that the companies who
use advertising to sell their goods don’t have the least motive for letting
others know how effective it is. Of course, the ad agencies have a motive
for publicizing their success, because advertising is their advertising, so to
speak. But they are bound to confidentiality by the people for whom they
create the ads, the marketers who pay them, and those marketers much
prefer success or failure to remain a well-kept secret. One reason for this is
that if their competitors find out which ads work and which don’t, then all
those competitors need to do is imitate the ads that are successful.
1

http://www.financial-portal.com/articles/article229.html#Selling

Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising, First Edition. Robert Heath.
C

2012 Robert Heath. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Seducing the Subconscious

Competitive paranoia is especially rife in the USA, where more money is
spent on advertising than anywhere else in the world. Ask a US ad agency
how much their client has spent on a campaign, or how much it has
earned them in extra revenue, and you’ll find the door politely shut in
your face. And if you do manage to find someone who can give you this
information, you’re more likely to get an injunction than permission to
publish it.
There are a few exceptions. The ARF (Advertising Research Foundation)
David Ogilvy Awards annually publish a series of case studies which occasionally give you an indication of how successful an advertising campaign
has been. But the data are mostly very generalized. They’ll tell you how
much more awareness was created, or how many people liked the advertising. They might even mention how much sales have increased over a certain
period, or how much their share of the market has grown. But there will
rarely be anything specific about what the ad campaign actually achieved.
Take for example the 2009 Dove “Real Beauty” campaign.2 The Ogilvy
Awards case study says that “engagement” increased 12%, but since no one

knows what engagement is that doesn’t really tell you much. It also says
that the overall strategy increased market share by 33% in the USA, UK,
and Germany. But that was over a 4-year period between 2003 and 2007,
and was for all the activity that went on over this period (i.e., promotions,
distribution drives, sales incentives, PR activity, etc., etc.) What it doesn’t
tell you is how much the TV advertising earned.
In the UK, marketers are slightly more relaxed about revealing business
data, and the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards provide a gold mine of
hard evidence about how advertising campaigns have worked.3 That is why
you’ll find I’ve quoted many more UK than US case studies in this book.
There is much more information to work with, which makes them much
better at illustrating how advertising works.
But there’s a second reason why marketers are coy about how successful
their advertising is. And that is because they often don’t know. The industrialist John Wanamaker is famously quoted as having said “Half my
advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” Less well-known is
that in an interview in 1998, Niall FitzGerald, then chairman of Unilever,
observed that “If someone asked me, rather than one of my distinguished
predecessors, which half of my advertising was wasted I would probably say
2
3

Advertising Research Foundation David Ogilvy Awards on www.warc.com
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, www.ipa.co.uk


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Introduction

3

90% is wasted but I don’t know which 90% (Lannon 1998: 20).” Astonishing, isn’t it, that we can ferry people to and from the surface of the moon,
yet according to the head of the world’s second biggest advertiser we still
can’t work out if an ad campaign has been a success.
One explanation for this confusion is that ads frequently seem able to
defy reason. For example, it is widely believed in the ad industry that ads
we like are more effective than ads we don’t like, because people are more
willing to watch them (Biel 1990). So how do you explain the following?

Love or Hate?
Over the past few years a whole raft of what are known as price comparison
web sites have grown up in the UK. These sites enable you to check if you
can get a better deal on services such as power, telecoms, and insurance.
Traffic for these web sites is almost entirely driven by TV advertising, and so
they make an interesting test bed for what sort of advertising does and does
not work.
On Saturday, January 16, 2010, in the midst of a terrible recession which
had decimated profits of the UK’s leading commercial TV channel, the UK
Guardian newspaper published an article with a headline “How to save
the TV advertising industry? Simples! Send for Aleksandr the meerkat.”4
The article referred to “Compare-the-Market.com,” which had ingeniously

invented a fictional web site entitled “Compare the Meerkat.” Their hugely
popular ad campaign featured an anthropomorphized meerkat called Aleksandr bemoaning that fact that people confused his meerkat dating site
with the Compare-the-Market web site on which you could buy cheap car
insurance.
“A lot of people have been taken aback by how successful Aleksandr has
been,” the Guardian announced. The article pointed out that Aleksandr
Orlov, the meerkat in question, had generating an avalanche of followers
on Twitter and Facebook, in the process becoming the must-have children’s
toy for Christmas 2009. Gerry Boyle, chief executive of media buying giant
Zenith Optimedia, was quoted as saying “The huge success of these campaigns in capturing the public’s attention has proved those who argue TV
advertising is dying wrong.”

4

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So just how hugely successful had the meerkat advertising been? The
Guardian, quoting Mintel, claimed the meerkat advertising had “propelled” Compare-the-Market.com from being in the low teens to fourth
most popular UK price comparison site behind MoneySupermarket.com
and Confused.com. Sounds good, but the problem was this also put them
behind a web site with an equally high awareness advertising campaign,
GoCompare.com.
For their advertising, GoCompare.com had invented a character called
Gio Compario, an opera singer who regularly interrupted people’s leisure
activities by exhorting them to “Go Compare” in a loud operatic tenor voice.
Gio Compario had also broken some records in 2009, by being named as
the UK’s most irritating ad campaign for a second year running. It was not
made clear which of these two campaigns – the meerkat or Gio Compario –
had generated the most attention, but there was no doubt which was liked
least and which was liked most.
Which makes it all the more surprising that a little over a year later the
UK Sunday Times announced that “spending on advertising . . . has driven
GoCompare into pole position in what is now a four way fight between Confused, MoneySupermarket, and Compare the Market.” Apparently, despite
incurring the nation’s universal opprobrium, the Gio Compario advertising was a huge success. In other words, the UK’s most hated advertising
seems to have been a great deal more effective than the UK’s most loved
advertising.
What this tale illustrates is that simple indicators such as liking or hating
ads are not very reliable predictors of ad effectiveness. It may seem logical
common sense that an ad you like will work better than one you hate, but
ads are expert at defying logic. And here’s another common sense example.
Surely an ad will not work if no one can recall the message it is trying
to get over?

The Curious Case of O2
The UK mobile phone network market is renowned as being one of the

world’s most competitive, and, as with price comparison web sites, success
has always been driven by advertising. During the 1990s, two ad campaigns dominated the market: Orange, with its iconic “The future’s bright,
the future’s Orange” advertising, and One-2-One, with its celebrity-driven


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Introduction

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“Who would you like to have a one-to-one with?” Alongside these two high
profile brands there were two others that struggled for awareness: one was
Vodafone; the other, owned by the UK landline operator British Telecom,
was Cellnet.
At the end of the 1990s, Vodafone transformed its fortunes by buying a
string of companies (including Orange) and becoming the world’s biggest
mobile network operator. No such luck for Cellnet. In 2001, the struggling
network was spun off and relaunched under the name O2 (pronounced
Oh-Two). For some years it ran an unassuming advertising campaign that
occasionally showed doves taking off and people dancing, but mostly featured blue water with bubbles bubbling through it and some lilting music

in the background. The rather cryptic message at the end was “O2. See what
you can do.”
O2 spent a lot of money on this campaign, and although people were
aware of their ads, virtually no one was able to recall what they were meant
to be telling them about O2. Partly this was because the “See what you can
do” message in the ads didn’t really make a lot of sense to anyone, and
partly because there were no dramatic price claims or deals or innovative
new product features which might have been worth remembering. The fact
is blue water and bubbles are hardly characteristics one might look for in a
mobile phone.
So, by 2005, you might think you can guess where each of these brands
stood in the UK? Here’s the answer. One-2-One had been taken over by
T-Mobile, and had 11.2 million UK customers. Acquisitive Vodafone had
14.8 million customers. Orange’s famous advertising had secured it 14.9
million customers.
And what had O2’s somewhat meaningless water and bubbles achieved
for the company? Well, it had resulted in the dying network becoming the
UK’s biggest phone company, with 17 million customers. No, that’s not a
misprint. O2 had in 4 short years become market leader. More interestingly, it had achieved this success without undercutting other brands on
price, without having any particular technical advantage, and without using any exceptional promotional activity. O2 seems to have achieved market
leadership using little more than its blue bubbling advertising.
How could this have happened? How could advertising that communicated next to nothing have driven a brand to leadership of such a competitive
market? As you read on you will find out, and you will also find out how
many other companies have done the same. Because my theory is that the


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Seducing the Subconscious

most successful advertising campaigns in the world are not those we love
or those we hate, or those with messages that are new or interesting. They
are those like O2 that are able to effortlessly slip things under our radar and
influence our behavior without us ever really knowing that they have done
so. And the way in which these apparently inoffensive ad campaigns work
is by “seducing” our subconscious.
Unfortunately, just how advertising manages to seduce our subconscious
isn’t a simple story. It turns out it is able to influence us this way because we, as
human beings, are peculiarly susceptible to certain types of communication.
This susceptibility is a function of the way in which our minds have evolved,
so to understand what is going on it is necessary to become acquainted with
a lot of new ideas in psychology.
For this reason I’ve approached the subject rather as an engineer might.
I’ve started by taking current models of advertising to pieces, and then I’ve
rebuilt them in stages into a new Subconscious Seduction model. In the process I’ve used cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, neurobiology,
and philosophy as the building blocks. As I go along I’ve tried to illustrate
each stage with case studies of advertising, and at various points I’ve also
included diagrams of how the model is developing.
I apologize if you find this approach a little over-diligent, but I believe

it is necessary. After all, many people have vested interests in proving the
Subconscious Seduction model wrong: some have built their businesses on
the old model, and others are just paranoid that advertising will be shown to
be something sinister and underhand. But advertising isn’t either of these;
it’s just a lot more complicated than any of us ever imagine it is.
The book is set out in five parts, and here is a brief description of each
of them.

Part One: Taking Advertising Apart
Chapter 1 starts by describing the traditional persuasion model. It quickly
becomes apparent that not even those who work in the advertising business
are always aware of how advertising influences us. The most common view
is that what it does is communicate some sort of persuasive information,
which in turn enables us to go out and make a rational decision about what
we want to buy.
Chapter 2 looks at alternative ideas, both from within the industry and
from related fields such as psychology. The first of these was proposed by the


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Introduction

7

psychologist Walter Dill Scott over 100 years ago, when print and outdoor
advertising were the only media available. Scott, like me, saw advertising
as able to subconsciously manipulate the mind of the consumer. Unfortunately, despite being lauded by many advertisers at the time, his ideas did
not fit with those held by the people controlling the media. Bear in mind
most of these media moguls were ex-salesmen, for whom the overt presentation of persuasive arguments was the watchword for success, so it perhaps
isn’t really surprising that Scott’s revolutionary ideas were sidelined and
forgotten.
It is a testimony to the conservatism of the ad industry that the second
major assault on persuasion did not take place for over 60 years. This time it
was another psychologist, Herb Krugman, and his target was TV advertising.
Krugman simply couldn’t understand how the trivial rubbish that made up
most of the early TV commercials could persuade anyone to buy anything.
He set about proving that most TV advertising was watched in a state of “low
involvement” compared with print ads. His ideas were lent weight by the
work of a leading statistician, Andrew Ehrenberg, who showed that it was
highly unlikely that advertising changed anyone’s attitudes, and therefore
equally unlikely that it could be persuasive.
The industry had a huge problem accepting that we don’t pay much
attention to ads and they don’t change our attitudes. So it isn’t much of a
surprise that the response to Krugman and Ehrenberg was, as with Scott, to
express great interest in their ideas . . . and then politely ignore them.
But it seems to be an undeniable fact that we don’t pay much attention
to ads, and in Chapter 3 I start laying out the evidence that supports
this assertion. It turns out that we probably spend more time avoiding
advertising, especially TV advertising, than we do consuming it. And there
are many good reasons why we should behave in this way. First, because we

have been surrounded by advertising all our lives, it is no longer a novelty.
Second, because everything is so competitive nowadays, we assume that
mostly all advertisers will do is assert that their brand is better than all the
rest. Third, because brands are all pretty good, it seems unlikely that much
in the way of evidence will be presented to back up this assertion. In other
words, we don’t pay attention to advertising because we don’t expect to
learn anything particularly new and interesting from it, and we frankly have
better things to do with our lives.
Of course, by ignoring advertising we assume that it will not have any
effect on us. In the second part of the book I start to examine whether or
not this is true.


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Part Two: The Psychology of Communication
When it comes to the way in which we process communication, our minds

turn out to make everything much more complicated than you might expect. Chapter 4 looks at how learning and attention interact when we are
processing advertising. It becomes necessary to consider not just where we
are directing our attention, but how much attention we are paying at any
one time. I also discuss a memory system that enables us to learn even when
we pay no attention at all to advertising; a mechanism known as Implicit
Learning.
Chapter 5 looks at how our learning from communication interacts with
our memory systems. Our explicit memory – the one we use to recall things –
turns out to be really quite limited. That is why we find it hard to recall
advertisements and easy to forget them. But we are also equipped with
implicit memory, which is not only inexhaustible but extremely durable.
Implicit memory is informed by Implicit Learning, and it stores pretty much
everything we perceive. It is also able to connect these perceptions with
semantic memory, where we store meaning. This is a critically important
step in explaining how advertising processed at low or even zero levels of
attention might be able to influence us.
Chapter 6 looks at a new way of categorizing learning from communication. I define three different types of mental activity: Perception, Conceptualization, and Analysis. These operate across our three types of learning:
Active, Passive, and Implicit Learning. These definitions help us get a better
understanding of how we process advertising and store what we process. The
most important finding is that Implicit Learning is by far the most common
way of processing advertising, Passive Learning is the next most common,
and Active Learning happens rarely if at all. In this chapter I also discuss
subliminal exposure, which has nothing at all to do with how advertising
affects us, and the much more important subject of peripheral exposure,
which has a lot to do with how advertising affects us.
Chapter 7 examines the problems that arise when advertisers try to get us
to pay attention. One obstacle is that the more we attend to ads, the better we
are able to “counter-argue” their messages, and the less convincing we start
to find the claims they make. Another even more troublesome trait is that,
in order to prevent our minds becoming too cluttered, we are equipped

with a mechanism called Perceptual Filtering which enables us to ignore
those elements we don’t want to pay attention to. That of course means that


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if we don’t think we are going to learn anything from an advertisement we
can direct our minds to focus on the bits we enjoy and filter out the bits we
don’t (e.g., the message and the name of the brand being advertised).
But there are elements in advertising that elude these defense mechanisms, the most obvious being those connected with emotion. How we
process emotion and indeed how our conscious and subconscious really
work are the subjects of the third part of the book.

Part Three: Emotion and Consciousness
Until quite recently psychologists thought that emotions were a result of our
thinking. In Chapter 8 I show that emotional processing, far from being the
last thing we do, is the first. Indeed, it turns out that emotional processing is

a function of an instinctive part of our brain that long pre-dates conscious
thinking, and therefore has to operate automatically and subconsciously.
In order to understand this it becomes necessary to probe what we mean
by our subconscious and what it does. This is dealt with in Chapter 9,
and is possibly the most problematic idea you will encounter. Many of
those who study consciousness now accept that everything we do with our
mind is done at a subconscious level, and that “consciousness” is just an
observer. So our conscious mind doesn’t behave like a computer, more like
a computer monitor. Our thinking goes on subconsciously, and a small
part of it – effectively what our minds can cope with – is fed through to
the monitor for us to look at. So when we seem to argue with ourselves,
what we are “aware” of is our mind reporting an argument that happened
subconsciously sometime earlier.
Spooky? Not really. I find this way of looking at ourselves is surprisingly liberating. It explains why we can do things so well without thinking
about them – instinctively reaching out and catching a falling glass before it hits the ground, for example – and it explains why we perceive so
much more than we think we do. But it also explains why there exists in
us a huge vulnerability to certain types of communication, most notably
advertising.
Chapter 10 looks at the interaction between attention and emotion, and
explains why persuasion-based advertising models don’t work. Advertisers
think that their creativity makes us like ads more and pay more attention to
them. What really happens turns out to be the opposite: the more advertisers


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attempt to subconsciously seduce us with creativity, the more we like it, the
less we feel threatened by it, and the less attention we feel we need to pay to
it. So the more creative advertising is, the less attention we pay, and the less
well we recall the message it is trying to get over.
But the sting in the tail is that the less attention we pay, the more effective the subconscious seduction becomes. In other words, by paying less
attention we effectively give advertisers permission to influence our subconscious.

Part Four: Decisions and Relationships
In order to understand exactly how our behavior is influenced by emotion
in advertising we first need to understand how we make decisions. Chapter
11 examines in detail what psychologists now accept, which is that our
emotions act as a gatekeeper for all our decisions. Indeed, the influence
of our emotions is so powerful that we cannot make a decision unless our
emotions concur with it. And if we don’t have time to think about a decision,
our emotions will effectively make it for us via our intuition. That, of course,
means that emotion in advertising is able to influence our behavior far more
than anyone ever thought.
There’s more: in Chapter 12 we find that it is also emotion that underpins
our relationships, through something known as metacommunication. It
might surprise some of you to realize that we have relationships with lifeless
entities such as brands, but we do; those who have witnessed the love and

attention that some people lavish on their cars will know exactly what I am
talking about.
Chapter 13 presents the complete Subconscious Seduction model of how
advertising works. This chapter discusses some of the contextual influences that now direct our lives, and combines these with the psychologic learning in Parts Two to Four. I find there are two important ways
in which advertising is able to influence our behavior at a subconscious
level. The first of these is Subconscious Associative Conditioning. This occurs when something in an advertisement triggers an emotive reaction,
and over time subconsciously transfers that emotive reaction to a brand.
The second is Subconscious Relationship Manipulation. This occurs when
the creativity in the advertisement subconsciously influences the way you
feel about a brand. The model that emerges in this chapter is by now


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quite complex, but, as I said earlier, this is not a simple situation we are
dealing with.

Part Five: A Fresh Look at Advertising
In the last section of the book I start to explore the implications of the
Subconscious Seduction model. Chapter 14 gives you an idea of just how
gullible we all are, and how easy it is for external stimuli of all sorts to
influence us. For example, randomly nodding or shaking our heads while
listening can change our opinions, and the simple act of filling in a questionnaire with a particular color pen can exert an influence on what we buy.
This chapter also explains how we have, tucked away in our subconscious,
far more knowledge about the detail of advertising than we would probably
like to have. And, what is more, because it is in our subconscious, there is
no way we can get it out.
Many of the examples dealt with up until now are from TV. Chapter 15
discusses how new media, most especially the internet, influences us. I also
address what is perhaps the most subconsciously seductive of all media, the
practice of paying to place products in TV programs.
All this invites us to ask if it is right that advertising should be allowed to
have so much influence over us. This question is addressed in Chapter 16. It
transpires that the question should be: “Is there anything we can do about
how much influence advertising has on us?” And the answer is “very little.”
We can and do ban it for products that can harm us – although not quickly
enough and not in enough countries – but the wider problem is that if we
ban advertising from one media it simply pops up in another. And if we ban
it altogether it might well pop up in places where it can’t be monitored and
controlled at all. So for the benefit of society, like alcohol, it is perhaps best
to have it out in the open where we can keep an eye on it.
In Chapter 17 I explain how you can spot when you are being subconsciously seduced by advertising. In four case studies I show how brands on
both sides of the Atlantic have become superbrands using advertising that
carries hidden messages. Nothing especially sinister, I hasten to add: just
extremely clever.
Finally, I conclude by asking where all this takes us. It won’t surprise you to
learn that I have a special concern about what Subconscious Seduction might

be doing to our children. But I also wonder why this extraordinarily powerful


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mechanism is not more widely used in public broadcast advertising, where
it would be of far more benefit to us.
So I invite you to begin this journey through advertising. I suspect that
once you have completed it you will be astonished by how much advertising
affects your everyday behavior. And perhaps even more astonished by how
little you realized this was going on.


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Taking Advertising Apart


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The Persuasion Model

“. . .there are no hidden persuaders. Advertising

works openly, in the bare and pitiless sunlight.”
Rosser Reeves
Reality in Advertising (1961)
All of us think we know how advertising works. It’s nothing very clever or
special; in fact, it’s dead simple. Personally, I’m certain this is why we get so
angry when we hear about admen earning fat salaries and forever having
expensive lunches. What they do, we think, is money for old rope.
Advertising mostly starts with a something some company wants to
persuade us to buy. I say “mostly,” because occasionally we see governments
advertising things they want us to do, but for the purposes of this book I’m
going to stick to advertising for branded products or services that companies
want to sell us.
Advertising like this, for commercial brands, dates back at least 2500 years
(Fletcher 1999: 11). But the idea that it can be treated as part of a systematic
sales activity is only about 100 years old. We know this because of St Elmo
Lewis, a salesman for the National Cash Register Company. Right at the
end of the nineteenth century Mr Lewis invented a four-step formula for
doorstep selling:

r
r
r
r

Get Attention,
Provoke Interest
Create Desire
Finally, get Action by closing the sale.

Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising, First Edition. Robert Heath.

C

2012 Robert Heath. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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Universally known by the acronym AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire,
Action), this led to the first formal model of advertising ever adopted
(Barry & Howard 1990). Many advertisers nowadays still think this is how
advertising works.
So, back to this thing the company wants to sell. The first step in the
process is to try to think of some sort of message or proposition that will
change our beliefs about their product and persuade us to buy it. That
message needs to be something that will make us think their product works
better than the competitors, or is better value, or is newer or smarter or

sexier, etc. I’m sure you get the picture. The company usually devises this
message in conjunction with the ad agency. Once everyone is happy that the
message encapsulates all the best things they have to say about the product,
they go to a couple of even more important people in the ad agency called the
“creative” team (they must be important because, rather as in the popular
US TV series Mad Men, they are paid an awful lot of money for mostly
seeming to sit around and do very little).
The creative team then dreams up some daft creative idea to justify the ad
agency charging the client lots of money. (I hope you’ll excuse my cynicism,
but I did work in advertising for a very long time.) Often this creative idea
seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with what is being advertised,
and sometimes it doesn’t have much connection with the message the
company wants to get over either. Anyway, once everyone is happy with
the creative idea they then stick the message onto the end of it and go
and make the ad. Next they put it on TV or in a newspaper or onto some
other media . . . and sit back and wait for results. “Simples,” as the meerkat
would say.
This process is so unexceptional you might wonder why it’s worth
me writing a whole book about it. After all, Claude Hopkins, one of
the first admen, did that back in 1923. Mr Hopkins averred then that
“Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become . . . one of the safest of business ventures” (Hopkins 1998). Selling through advertising was, for Hopkins, a rational, information-based process, with no room for humor or
eccentricity.
But, like all business ventures, as soon as you invent something someone
comes along and tries to measure it. In this case the someone was Daniel
Starch, and the measurement he introduced was to show people a copy
of the newspaper with the ad in it, ask if they had read the ad, and then
ask what they had “noted” about it. Starch’s “Reading and Noting” system


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meant that getting us to pay attention to advertising became that much
more important.
To solve this problem of lack of attention, media owners back in the 1920s
decided to employ experts to write advertisements for their clients. Again,
this wasn’t exactly a new idea. Take for example, this quote from Richard
Addison writing in the Tatler:
The great Art of writing Advertisements is the finding out of a proper Method
to catch the Reader’s Eye, without which a good thing may pass over unobserved. (Fletcher 1999: 16)

You may be surprised to learn that Addison wrote this not in 1920s, nor
indeed in the 1820s, but in 1710. Three centuries ago. Only a little later, in
1759, the famous Samuel Johnson perceptively wrote:
Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it therefore becomes necessary to gain attention by a magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime, sometimes pathetic.
(Fletcher 1999: 17)

Now you can see what the role of those creative people who sit around all
day seeming to do very little is. “Negligently perusing” (i.e., not paying much
attention to) ads has always been seen as the big problem for advertisers,
and “eloquence” (i.e., the sort of imaginative stuff that is produced by the
creative team) is supposedly the solution.
Of course, it was never seen as that much of a problem when advertising
was restricted to newspapers. What changed everything was the arrival of
commercial television in the USA in the mid 1950s. Suddenly advertising
budgets were big business, and the ad agencies that designed and produced
the ads likewise became big business. Commercial TV, by effectively bringing
the cinema into our living rooms, revolutionized the creative opportunities
open to these ad agencies. And getting people to pay attention suddenly
became the focus of everyone’s attention.
Well, it had to. Commercial TV was hugely expensive, and it only existed
because of the revenue it earned from advertising, so it simply had to offer
something a bit special. What it did offer was the chance for the message to
be accompanied by music and movement and drama and celebrity, all those
things we take for granted these days. The early viewers of TV clustered
around their sets with rapt attention, much as children who have never
watched TV before do now. TV advertising was an almost overnight success,